Random Asexual

A simple gesture that means a lot  <3

(A bit late to share it but it’s never too late to to spread love)

Things that are a fanfic writer’s responsibility:

Things that are not a fanfic writer’s responsibility:

I got 99 problems and being responsible for your competent use of the internet ain’t one.

Or, if you feel that’s more suited for the experience: user CHOSE NOT TO USE ARCHIVE WARNINGS. In which case, even more strongly than normal, READER BEWARE.

i agree with most of this but “creator chose not to use content warnings” is a bullshit tag that shouldn’t exist. it isn’t an actual warning, it doesn’t mean anything except maybe “this author wants to be ~edgy~,” and there’s no good reason for its presence on ao3.

seriously, i cannot think of a single situation in which “creator chose not to use archive warnings” is appropriate to use except maybe, maybe if your piece has content that could be a common trigger but isn’t available as an archive warning (e.g. incest), but even then it still feels like a cop-out and you absolutely have to make sure that content is still tagged for in your main tags

CNTUAW is perfectly fine, since it says: “I’m opting out of the warning system and you’ll have to decide for yourself if you’re willing to read my fic and whatever might be in there”. That is a valid choice for an author, and it’s just as valid for a reader to say: “What? Nope, not gonna read this.” Nobody forces anybody to read a fic that has a CNTUAW tag. The only reason I can think of why people think this warning is invalid is because they assume that they somehow are entitled to every story they see, that somehow the authors owe them their fics. Which is ridiculous nonsense. People like the above are why I by now refuse to use Archive Warnings and exclusively tagg ALL my fics “Author chose not to use Archive Warnings”. It’s so that people who feel entitled to my fic will not want to read it :) (I still get enough engagement on my fics. Boo fucking hoo ;)

Idk how to answer someone’s question when they block me but… well.

They don’t seem to understand that “I’m opting out of the warning system” is a PART OF THE WARNING SYSTEM on Ao3 and even the DEFAULT Archive Warning according to their TOS FAQ.

To suggest I don’t post to Ao3 because I like using their default warning is…more than a little bizarre xD Again, it all boils down to “ONLY THE WAY I DO FANDOM IS RIGHT!” - while Ao3 instead explicitly offers authors several different ways of doing fandom/posting their fics, which aren’t inferior to each other. JUST DIFFERENT.

But then, far too many people don’t understand that “different” doesn’t mean “bad”, and even when the site specifically tells its users “We offer you different ways of doing this”, apparently some people think that those who actually take advantage of that offer should…leave? *lol* Also, I threw a fit after people told me how authors were “exclusionary” and “dicks” etc. etc. for using CNTUAW as if they were owed to be able to read every fucking fic. Which they are not. (Yet another fact this person doesn’t get.)

In short:

Every time I see wank about the “Choose Not to Warn” option on AO3 I remember how controversial the idea of MANDATORY WARNINGS was when the archive was created.  This was 2008-9!  No one in the wider world had heard of trigger warnings!  They WEREN’T A THING!!!  No where!  Fandom was the place where the concept of trigger warnings caught on and a big part of that was because of AO3′s inclusion of tags and warnings.

So there was so much debate over WHAT kind of content requires MANDATORY warnings?  And why?  This wasn’t how fic worked before AO3.  Yeah, many authors would warn for things like non-con or graphic violence but it was still very voluntary and up to each individual. 

Many authors at the time HATED the idea of including warnings or being forced to warn because they felt that putting a warning for things or a tag at all would ruin the suspense and surprise reveal of their plot.  And this wasn’t a fringe concern! 

That’s why there’s an opt-out option!  Because a community is about compromise and balancing the needs of authors and readers and people with very different feelings about how fiction should work.  So having mandatory requirements to warn for certain things AND an option that lets people opt-out of this requirement while still warning readers that these are DANGEROUS AND UNCHARTED WATERS is a fucking compromise.

I know a lot of younger people seem to have never heard of compromise because they’ve been raised by the extremes of online discourse and Fox News but when you’re literally building community infrastructure it’s the name of the game.

It kills me that kids somehow think AO3 was made without considering these issues, that previous fandom generations haven’t already hashed out these fights.  That the extreme growth and popularity of AO3 isn’t inherent proof that the system that was put in place after MUCH discussion and consideration WORKS.

This doesn’t feel like compromise to me though because the people who say “Fics don’t need to be tagged” get 100% of what they want for their stories, and people who say “All fic needs to be tagged” don’t get what they want at all. It’s the illusion of compromise.

Basically, if the people who don’t want to do something come out of the argument able to behave exactly as they wanted before the argument began, you have not actually created a compromise, you have given them the win

I’m 41 by the way, started reading fanfic back when it was primarily personal archives

The disconnect I think you’re having is that you are thinking of AO3 as a service for the readers instead of for the authors.  It is an archive created by and FOR fanwriters and it takes a multitude of differing fanwriter perspectives into account by giving the CREATORS control over their own stories.  And it provides warnings to readers who only want to read tagged works.  But it doesn’t allow readers to dictate how writers present their work, because it’s not a reader-customer-focused business, but a nonprofit to preserve fanwork.  The compromise is that instead of imposing one way of doing things on every user (i.e. every writer) each writer gets to choose for themselves.

The customers of AO3 are the writers, not the readers.  That millions of readers do enjoy it, is basically a bonus.  (That costs the organization money instead of makes it because it’s ad-free.)

@iamwestiec‘s tags are EXACTLY right:

unforgiven.

really funny that every website is in an arms race to make itself as bad as possible and immediately someone makes a firefox extension to fix it

avg day on late Web 2.0

The subject I can't shake: rocks. Gouache and colored pencil on watercolor paper, 4.5x6in

queen how could you leave this in the replies

Fehér holló (Unmute !)

ivory tweaks of / reaper’s observatory / seeking signs of life

you can't ship these two characters they're "sibling coded" bc they banter :/ you can't ship these two characters they grew up together which is basically the same thing as incest :/ you can't enjoy this character because they did bad things and if you enjoy them you're condoning that and you are evil :/ you can't ship this character with anyone because they're minor coded bc they're short/autistic :/ you can't ship these two because they're enemies so it's abuse :/

you have to watch this show/read this book bc it has queer representation! what's it about? uuuuuuh..... ....... it has queer characters!!!!

why isn't fandom fun anymore what happened we will never know

why isn’t fandom

fun anymore what happened

we will never know

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

With the phasing-out of personalized blogs, the removal of chat colors, and now the removal of avatars on the dashboard, it really feels like the tumblr staff just fucking hates personality and individuality.

As OP had mentioned, after the recent update it's nearly impossible to find an URL on dash that leads to your user.tumblr.com blog, only the tumblr.com/blog/user space.

I'm calling it now, it won't surprise me if they'll fully remove the html web blogs from existance.

They really are actively and aggressively depersonalizating tumblr. Everyone must be uniform and no one should have uniqueness.

Such joy :)

I found this proverb somewhere on this cursed website. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Doing literally any historical research on the Rosicrucians is torture. I'll spend two hours trying to track down a citation from a book that hasn't been in print since 1972 only to learn that it was written by a crackpot who thinks the Catholic Church is "Under significant Jewish influence."

Or it's "The Order of the Rose Cross began in the year 1353 BCE with their founder, the Pharaoh Akhenaten." Like that's not even the right fake story knock it off.

Literally one of the best modern sources on the history of the Illuminati is a Catholic Italian sociologist and anthropologist who defended the church of Scientology in court for personal idealogical reasons.

It doesn't help that in the mid 1650s/early 1700s, groups like the Rosicrucians were just kinda naturally forming all over the place like fruit flies. They were all loosely organized and didn't keep records so putting a date on anything is hard.

Plus, they were all writing in one of europes most erudite periods, so putting any useful narrative together means stitching together like six languages worth of sources.

When I was a kid edgy alternative teens/tweens used to draw scary gory demented vent art and it was literally fine cause it was just kids trying to act ~sick and twisted~ in like a quirky way to cope with the world like literally just reading JTHM and going “that’s so cool I wanna draw like that” but nowadays a kid can’t draw like a Nightmare Before Christmas-esque creepy face without a bunch of true crime girlies going “oh my god they’re literally the next Jeffrey Dahmer their parents need to put them under observation or something before they start murdering animals or something”

“Obsession with dark and violent things is a warning sign of being a future killer”

Have you literally ever met an emo kid? They’ll draw demons and ghouls bleeding out of every orifice and threatening each other with big knives and then cry when they find a dead bunny in their yard

In the middle of a strike.

If you need context, earlier this year, CorridorDigital put out an "AI-made anime," where an AI filter was used to convert live action footage into "animation" (for the record, this is NOT animation. Animation is not a look, it's a process. By this logic, anyone using that Pixar Snapchat face filter is a Pixar animator). They touted themselves as "revolutionizing animation."

They were met with considerable backlash and criticism from the animation community. For one, they were taking frames from the real anime Vampire Hunter D to feed the AI. For another, the video was essentially a proof-of-concept for how "easy" and "inexpensive" it is to reduce animation to an automate-able process.

Well, Corridor did not learn anything, because they released a sequel... In the middle of a strike against the use of AI to replace/exploit/profit off of the labor of workers in the film industry. Corridor assured they hired their own artist to train the AI, but remember that industry discourse like this is interconnected. They may not be stealing art, but any studio that sees this and goes 'wow, it's that easy' will. Corridor's also boasting about AI democratizing animation-making. Now anyone can make animation in their bedroom with nothing but a camera and a free software! Except, anyone could already make animation in their bedroom with nothing but a camera and a free software. I made animation in my bedroom with nothing but a camera and a free stop-motion software when I was 10 years old.

Anyways, work like this is exactly what studios hellbent on exploiting workers want to see. It doesn't matter if it's cool or fun. Remember that AI discourse is currently the frontlines of the labor crisis in the film industry. Corridor putting out this video as "fun education" in the middle of an strike is so incredibly irresponsible and disrespectful.

there was a time in my life where I painstakingly trained myself out of using "likes" and "ums" for public speaking, and then when I started learning about like basic linguistics and shit I realized that fillers are completely normal and useful parts of language and now I use them even in text all the time. I feel like if anyone suggested that I should remove them from my speech at this point I would genuinely just be like "alright well you're not ready to engage with the topic I'm discussing yet."

until you stop needing communication & language to be just one specific way for you to view it as skillful, authoritative, persuasive, educated, etc. then you aren't prepared to engage in deeper conversations about language. if you can't handle "likes" and "y'know?"s then you certainly won't be able to handle the ways in which multilingual speakers can use one language's grammar while speaking in another, you won't be able to handle AAC, you won't be able to handle discussions with people with verbal tics or stutters... like you're not going to be able to engage with a lot of language and therefore your understanding of language is not going to be enough, currently, to really get into studying the ways in which power interacts with language or analyzing creative writing on a granular level of phrasing, word choice, punctuation, spacing

internat habits that are good to learn

I am the same except in the last panel where instead I think this

I'm begging y'all, put at least minimum care into how you present your fics to the public.

"idk man you name it im tired" as a title tells me you didn't care.

"This is STUPID" in the tags. Okay, I won't read it then.

"I don't know how to do tags" tells me you didn't bother taking one look at any page in the archive to see how others tag and use it as reference. Or, you know, you could have asked, too.

"idk if this is trash, bc I worte this in the middle of the night bc idrk" in the summary doesn't really encourage me to open the story.

3 lines of tags on a 4k monitor, none of which are actual searchable tags but a stream of consciousness about the author's sleeping habits and music preferences, tell me you don't know what your story is about if you can't give us 2-4 main tropes and themes. Also, this isn't tumblr, come on mate.

"I hate myself for this fic" okay? Why did you write it then if it brought you discomfort? Moreover, why did you post it???

"Why Did I Write This?" well, hobbies are about joy and fun, if writing doesn't make you happy then maybe it's time to look for something else to do in your free time? No point in making yourself miserable.

"The Author Regrets Everything" paired with more self-deprecating tags suggest I better not bother opening the fic because it clearly made the author miserable and why would I be miserable as well?

"killing myself rn" please get help.

0 additional tags is better than that. Writing and sharing fics should be an act of care, not anguish.

Also just adding that if you put “sorry this is disgusting and bad and i’m going to hell for this,” the people who think you are bad for writing it will not forgive you and the people who clicked eager to read the story you advertised think you think they’re nasty.

who’s up thinking about after the threesome they both take you home by sue hyon bae i’m thinking about after the threesome they both take you home by sue hyon bae

normal time. im having it

oh this hurt.

Million Dollar Question